The Freddy litmus test, bathroom waters, and more corvid exchanges
Nightmare fuel, or an antidote to nightmare fuel? I can’t decide if wacky Freddy Krueger and friends is the former or the latter. Please click in to this tweet, watch this clip, then hit reply (it’ll go only to me) and tell me if this added to our reduced your pile of nightmare material.
(crossed my timeline via a retweet from @grahamskipper.)
"That's fine, but I really want the bathrooms." National treasure John Waters donated his vast art collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art as a restricted gift (which means they can’t remove pieces and sell them.) In exchange, he asked that they name the museum’s bathrooms after him. This very entertaining short CBC radio interview, which is available as an audio recording and a transcript, takes you through his rationale, how he thinks about art, and what he means by “good bad taste”. Here’s a snippet where he describes what his collection is about:
“All art that lasted in history made people insane when it first came out. Andy Warhol put the abstract expressionists out of business in one night with that soup can. People were furious. Then minimalism made people furious. Graffiti art made people furious. Performance art made people furious.
So I love art that makes you furious, because I'm in on it. You finally learn to see differently if you like art. And it's a secret club. It's like a biker gang where you learn a special language, you have to dress a certain way. I love all the ridiculous elitism about the art world. I think it's hilarious.”
The corvid gift exchange. There have been bananas about this before, the tendencyof crows to trade shiny or otherwise interesting objects for foodstuffs such as whole peanuts and eggs.
M. Crouton is the Twitter handle of Crouton the cow who lives along with a whole host of other animals at the Squirrelwood Equine Sanctuary. The people there told me that they’ve been leaving peanuts out for years and eventually struck up this barter relationship with the corvids.
Also down the thread:
We haven’t tried this with crows, though now I certainly would like to see if we can get similar magic going. The closest we’ve come other than our bird feeders is the deal we have tried to strike with cockroaches - we agree to transport them back outside rather than killing them if we find them inside the house in any state, and they agree to generally stay in the shadows and leave us alone. I’m not sure they fully grasp the terms, but we dutifully keep up our side of the bargain just the same.
Bonus bananas:
A good thought from Philip Glass
An LA Times story from 1918 about what people were doing during that pandemic
Different tastes aren’t layed out spatially in the brain, turns out
These are the bananas I found for you this week. You can hit reply and it will go only to me. Thank you.